MA student Carolina Wilson wins 2015 Student Murrow Award

The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) has awarded master’s student Carolina Wilson (MA ’15) with a 2015 Student Edward R. Murrow Award for her digital coverage of growing bike commuter traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Wilson earned the overall excellence award in the digital category of RTDNA’s new student segment for “Tired of Being Bumped, Caltrain Bike Commuters Push for More Space,” which was published on the Stanford Journalism Program’s news website Peninsula Press in December. With bike commuter ridership on Caltrain only growing in the Bay Area, Wilson’s story explored this heated issue among commuters, who are often bumped off trains due to a lack of sufficient bike capacity. Her original reporting combined an in-depth written narrative, original high-resolution photography, a video shot on a GoPro camera and data visualized on custom map graphics — all in a digital news package. The digital package was also published on Peninsula Press partner news site, SFGate.com.

Carolina Wilson, Stanford Journalism MA Class of 2015.

“Carolina tells stories effectively using multiple tools: text, video, and data visualization. Her use of data to discover and tell a story about public policy is exactly the type of journalism we hope to support in our coursework at Stanford,” said Jay Hamilton, Hearst Professor of Communication and Stanford Journalism Program Director.

“Carolina is, to use a baseball metaphor, a five-tool player,” Migielicz said. “In the fall course, when she produced this award-winning piece, she displayed a passion for stories and a knack for visuals and audio, although she did not have much experience with multimedia. It’s clear she is fantastic with people and her rapport is evidenced by insightful images and quotes. Her story instincts are spot-on and she has the editor’s eye and ear for the narrative arc. I’ll always be eager to see her next story.”

“Carolina makes handling the different mediums — including prose, documentary video, web publishing and data analysis — seem so naturally effortless,” Nguyen said. “But it’s a result of her eagerness to try new things, and to put in the hours she knows is needed to produce high-quality work.”

After graduating Stanford, Wilson will be working in New York City for Bloomberg, as part of its Latin American Emerging Markets team. She has previous internship experience at Knight Foundation in Miami and the South Bend Tribune in Indiana.